Rose MacLeod

								

these things?"
"No," she answered. "I have not had occasion to tell him. Not yet! But
about Peter." She faced round at him. "Peter is hypnotized by my father,
as they all are in the beginning. He won't paint any more portraits
while the spell lasts."
"Then he won't get Electra."
"He won't get her anyway,--not if he champions me. That's my
impression."
"But what does your father want him to do?"
"Nothing, that I know. It isn't that he chokes people off from other
channels. It's just that his yoke is heavy, for one thing, and that they
can't do too much for him. Peter has taken him literally. He will sell
all he has and give to the poor, and live on a crust. He'll think the
chief, too, is doing it; but he'll be mistaken. The chief never denied
himself so much as an oyster in his life."
They sat staring at each other, in the surprise of such full speech.
Osmond had a sense of communion he had never known. Peter and he had
talked freely of many things in the last week, but here was a strange
yet a familiar being to whom the wells of life were at once unlocked.
The girl's face broke up into laughter.
"Isn't it funny?" she interjected, "our talking like this?"
"Yes. Why are we doing it?" He waited, with a curious excitement, for
her answer. But she had gone, darting at a tangent on what, he was to
find, were her graceful escapes when it was simpler to go that way.
"It's very mysterious here," she said, glancing about the cabin, "very
dark and strange."
"Shall I throw on more wood?"
"If you like. I am not cold."
But he did not do it.
"You don't speak like a Frenchwoman," he ventured.
"I am not. You know that. I am an American."
"Yes; but you have lived in France."
"Always, since I was twelve. But I have known plenty of
English,--Americans, too. Shall I speak to you in French?"
He deprecated it, with hands outspread.
"No, no. I read it, by myself. I couldn't understand it, spoken."
She was smiling at him radiantly, and with the innocent purpose, even
he, in his ecstasy, felt, of making herself more beautiful and more
kind.
"Now," she was saying, "since we have met, you'll come to the house? You
won't let me stand in the way?"
His tongue was dry in his mouth. He felt the beauty of her, the pang of
seeing anything so sweet and having only the memory of it. Great
instincts surged up in him with longings that were only pain. They
seemed to embrace all things, the primal founts of life, the loyalties,
devotions, hopes, and tragedies. At last he understood, not with his
pulses only, but his soul. And all the time he had not answered her. She
was still looking at him, smiling kindly now, and, he believed, not
cognizant of the terror in his heart, not advertising her beauty as at
first he had supposed. She seemed a friend home from long absence. He
was speaking, and his voice, in his effort, sounded to him reassuringly
gentle.
"We'll see."